I'm serious. The positive part of the Yahoo! Answers experience
put me in the mood to finally put that Angelfire site to go use
as a Mathematics site. Yes, I am qualified to write about this
subject, having a graduate degree in it and having taught it
at the collegiate level, and having a (cough, cough) number
of years of tutoring experience under my belt. Never you mind
how many. A bunch.

What I'm going to start with are a few worked problem sets,
so if there's something you want to see done, shoot it over
here and I'll take a look at it. If nothing else, this is a
good excuse to get back to the library and do some reading.
The first text we'll be looking at is Introduction to
Mathematical Statistics by Hogg and Craig, which I highly
recommend as first text in the subject for a student who
has already had Calculus. Having dealt with the half teaching
that lower level courses at State Universities sometimes
require of those providing instruction, and having been the
hapless TA left to fill in the many gaps left by the text,
I've often seen students left confused by dumbed down texts
thatm in leaving out the details, ironically make the material
difficult to the point of incomprehensibility. While keeping
their presentation simple, Messrs. Hogg and Craig avoid
that pitfall, presenting their material with a level of
clarity, directness and rigor rare in texts on this level.

We'll look at some exercises from other texts as well,
including the requests I get, and the occasional proof
and counterexample, of course. What on earth does this
have to do with the Halls, you ask? A few things. It's
material that people seem to want to see, and which I'm
comfortable with providing them. Even taking the very
real need for improvement on my photo pages, I've found
the level of interest in that material to be limited, so
I'm looking for something that will draw in more visitors.
But, aside from that, the Halls have long been written
in opposition to Political Correctness from both the Left
and Right, and the abuse of Statistics plays a large role
on both. Disspelling a little innumeracy can do a lot
to make the public less susceptable to being fooled, and
the skills acquired are ones of general, practical use.

Figure that if you actually want to buy a book about
the subject, you're looking at a cost of at least $100.
This online text will be free. The downside, of course,
is that I'll be assembling it, in bits and pieces,
during my free time, so this free book won't hit
textbook length for a while.



Joseph Dunphy